Future

Those wanting a glimpse into the future of our federal government’s finances should have a gander at Illinois. The state recently “resolved” a high-profile battle over its budget. Taxpayers were clubbed with a 32% hike in income taxes in an effort to shore up massive underfunding in public employee pensions, among other deficiencies. But, predictably, it isn’t working. People are leaving the state in droves. In fact, Illinois now leads the nation in population collapse. Statistics show people leaving the state at the rate of 1 every 4.3 minutes and the state dropped from 5th place to 6th in terms […]

Predictability. People. Those are the two keystones of my research and forecasting successes: cycles and demographics. It can all be traced back to the day I was studying several charts that I’d laid out on my desk. I’d been looking at the Dow Jones Industrial Average adjusted for inflation when I glanced up and spotted the Baby Boomer’s birth wave. I was confused for a second. They looked identical. So, I laid the one page on top of the other, moved the demographic chart to the right by about 45 years, and they were a match! I immediately knew why, […]

When will America finally wake up? The borrower is the servant of the lender, and we now have a colossal 20 trillion dollar chain around our collective ankles. We have willingly enslaved ourselves, our children and our grandchildren, and yet our addiction is so insatiable that we continue to add more than 100 million dollars to our debt load every single hour of every single day. The national debt is sitting at a grand total of $ 20,162,176,797,904.13 at this moment, but now that the debt ceiling has been lifted that number is expected to shoot up very rapidly toward […]

In an Unpredictable Market, the Future of Gold Remains Clear Even though the markets haven’t behaved logically of late, it would have seemed a slam dunk for gold to rise if Donald Trump won. After all, we faced uncertainty around his policies, rising inflation from infrastructure spending, and higher expected growth rates. But instead, gold has headed back down more sharply. It had its initial rise in the futures market when Trump looked like he was going to win. But since then, it’s reversed course – the opposite of the stock markets. While I’ve been saying for a long time […]

The dramatic failure of the U.S. Senate’s last-ditch Obamacare repeal effort leaves Republicans so far without a major legislative win since Donald Trump took office. No healthcare reform. No tax reform. No monetary reform. No budgetary reform. The more things change in Washington… the more they stay the same. Despite an unconventional outsider in the White House, it’s business as usual for entrenched incumbents of both parties. The next major order of business for the bipartisan establishment is to raise the debt ceiling above $ 20 trillion. Since March, the Treasury Department has been relying on “extraordinary measures” to pay […]

The Peru Ministry of Energy and Mining just released their silver production data for February, and it was a whopper to the downside. Actually, I was quite surprised to see how much Peru’s silver production declined versus the same month last year. Also, Peru’s gold February production took a similar big hit. According to the Peru Ministry of Energy and Mining data, the country’s silver production fell 12% to 323.1 metric tons (mt) this February versus 367.4 mt the same month last year: This is a 44 mt decline in one month, nearly 1.5 million oz lost. Here is the […]

If the market has finally experienced a peak in world silver production, this warns of higher prices in the future. In addition, the global silver market suffered another large net supply deficit in 2016. These factors point to a big upcoming trend change in the future silver market. The Silver Institute just published its 2016 Silver Interim Report. This report is published by Thomson Reuters GFMS. According to their forecast for 2016, global silver production will decline to 887 million oz (Moz), down from 893 Moz in 2015: While forecasted global silver production for 2016 is down only slightly versus […]

We have a crisis of work. The secure, well-paid jobs of the past – many of them in manufacturing – are disappearing. What is replacing them is insecurity and uncertainty. Low-paid, part-time, temporary and seasonal work. The “feast or famine” of self-employment. The so-called “sharing economy”, where people rent out their possessions for a pittance. The “gig economy”, where people are paid performance by performance – or piece by piece. “Piecework“, we used to call it. Perhaps we should rediscover this name. Piecework has been the lot of most humans throughout history. Secure full-time jobs for wages have existed for less […]

In part 2 of our in-depth interview with Steve Hochberg, Steve explains what else makes Elliott wave analysis so useful and practical. If you missed part 1 of our in-depth interview with Steve Hochberg, you can watch it here. [Editor’s note: A text version of the interview is below.] Alexandra Lienhard: So, as editor of the Financial Forecast and the Short-Term Update, what’s the goal with the services you provide? Steve Hochberg: It’s interesting in how we form them. Bob [Prechter] writes the Elliott Wave Theorist, and has been doing so since 1978. Back in the 1990s, his interest […]

Hasta la vista… traders? One of our favorite movies at Macro Ops is Terminator 2: Judgement Day. The early 90’s classic had Arnold at his best and changed the sci-fi action genre forever. People have always had a particular fear of technology and machines, but Terminator really solidified that picture. How many times have you heard the “Skynet” argument when it comes to today’s technology? Fortunately, I don’t spend much time worrying about robots taking over the world. I’ll leave that to Elon Musk. But what does interest me is what artificial intelligence (AI) means for financial markets. While some […]